Educational institutions, such as schools and universities, constantly seek ways to leverage technology to effectively educate their students. Some schools have attempted to utilize student devices (such as cell phones, tablets, and laptops) for portions of the learning experience due to the widespread proliferation of these devices. But mobile devices have also proven to be a distraction in the classroom environment, and in some cases, can be used as a tool for cheating.
Attempts to leverage technology to add efficiencies to classroom processes such as roll call have been only moderately successful. For example, a teacher can be able to use an electronic spreadsheet to track student attendance, but this still requires going line by line to determine attendance. As a result, the process by which teachers perform roll call carries most of the same historical inefficiencies. Every minute devoted to such activities is a minute diverted away from teaching. In an environment where students often attend multiple classes with different teachers within the span of a day, these inefficiencies can become significant. If a class is only an hour long (or less), devoting even one minute to roll call has a cumulative impact on the amount of teaching and learning that can take place over the course of a semester or a year.
Meanwhile, management of mobile devices in a classroom setting is a serious issue. In some cases, teachers ban mobile devices despite potential efficiency benefits over pen and paper, simply because the potential for distractions and cheating is too high. Oftentimes, an instructor must pause from teaching to request that a student turn off a ringing phone, interrupting the flow of teaching and learning.
Current technological solutions for limiting use of mobile devices in the classroom are largely limited to device-specific restrictions imposed by parents on their children's devices, such as cell phones. Mobile devices can be manually and individually set to lock functionality based on geofencing an entire school area, for example, so that the student can not use the cell phone at school. This can pose problems when a student is no longer in class but still onsite, and does not address the problem of managing the mobile devices on a classroom-by-classroom basis. Centralized solutions have been largely non-existent, in part because of the many different types of mobile devices available, with disparate operating systems and applications. Additionally, school systems cannot afford to purchase and maintain specialized mobile devices for all of their students, and even if they could, it would not solve the issue of students' personal mobile devices becoming a distraction in class.
Based on at least these problems, a need exists for systems that better manage mobile devices to increase the efficiency of teaching in a classroom environment.